Modelling benefits and costs of decision making and feedback control for organisms in changing environments

Abstract

Cells (and organisms) make decisions in response to their environments. These decisions may help organism survival in environments with limited resource, but also constitute a cost to the organism in terms of the energy involved in sensing, processing, and responding to environmental change. Here, we explore the tradeoffs involved in a cost-benefit analysis of model organisms facing challenging deterministic or stochastic environments. The benefits of tunable versions of proportional-integral-derivative (PID) control are computed under different environmental behaviours; the model reflects both the ability to use this control to decide on cellular strategy and the potential cost associated with this feedback control. We quantify the circumstances under which control is most and least beneficial and the different weightings of the PID terms that perform best in specific and general situations. While our model is very simple, these results provide potential insight into the benefits of different control mechanisms, particularly at the single-cell level.